Chapter 16
New Orleans had resumed its ordinary business with a composure that seemed almost impertinent after so many weeks of wreck, delay, and heat.
Barges nosed against the levee. Porters bent under barrels and chests.
A woman on the river road was arguing over the price of bread with a baker who looked as if he had heard every complaint in the city and intended to survive all of them.
Men in shirtsleeves called to one another from a warehouse door.
A mule balked at a cart wheel, and the driver struck the shaft with his palm, less in anger than in long habit.
Elizabeth watched it all from the pirogue and felt, not relief exactly, but the sting of returning to a place that had no memory of what it had cost them to reach it.
The river had brought them back with its usual indifference.
The city received them in the same spirit.
Roofs patched after the hurricane caught the light in uneven squares.
Several shutters hung at a stubborn angle.
A wharf beam had been replaced by one that was still too fresh in colour and too proud in its grain.
Yet the place remained itself. Commerce had not paused to mourn the weather. It had merely adapted and gone on.
Darcy stood at the bow with one hand on the gunwale, the other resting near the sling of his injured shoulder as though he had not yet decided which movement would hurt less.
His arm in the sling was still awkward from Wickham's accident.
The cut at his shoulder had begun to seal, though every jolt of the boat must have reminded him of it.
He said nothing. That in itself meant little.
He had been silent for much of the return, and Elizabeth, who had come to know the difference between silence and retreat, did not mistake one for the other.
Mr. Bennet had met them at the landing with the air of a man who had expected delay and was not disappointed. He took in the torn sleeves, the sling, the mud, and Wickham's splinted arm with a single glance.
"You look as though the river has done its duty by you," he said.
"It has had assistance," said Thomas.
Mr. Bennet nodded. "I always prefer a disaster with company."
Cécile, who had come with Thomas, was already speaking to the dockhands in quick French, arranging for baggage to be carried, a packet to be fetched, and a room to be aired. She made necessity appear practical rather than alarming, which was one of her chief talents.
Elizabeth stepped ashore and at once felt the small, ridiculous hardness in her pocket.
Darcy's letter was still there. She had taken it from the wrecked camp and then, through fatigue and one interruption after another, left it unread.
It lay folded and dry against her gown, as if waiting for a quieter world. She had not found one.
Mr. Bennet looked at her. "You are returning to us with fewer ornaments than you left with."
"I fear the wilderness objected to embellishment," she said.
"Then it has one point in its favour." He turned toward Darcy. "You are more damaged than seems courteous."
Darcy gave a brief inclination of the head. "I have been obliged to travel."
"So I observe. Come in before the heat perfects the matter."
It was impossible, having reached the door of the house, not to believe that the worst had passed.
There was tea inside. There was a table.
There were familiar rooms with their narrow windows and the smell of paper, dust, and dried plants.
Mr. Bennet had evidently missed very little in their absence except peace.
Even that, Elizabeth thought, he had missed with moderation.
The first account of the war came not from the house, nor from the governor's office, nor from any solemn messenger. It came from a printer's window.
They had scarcely reached the levee street before a knot of men and women gathered before a broad sheet posted under glass, half in English and half in French.
One man read aloud from the English side while a woman near him translated to an older neighbour with the same urgency, though less breath.
Children stood on tiptoe to see. Two clerks argued over a line of type.
A porter with a coil of rope over his shoulder paused long enough to grin at the confusion and then, because he possessed a generosity uncommon among observers, pointed to the window for the newcomers.
"Read that," he said.
Thomas moved first. Elizabeth followed. Darcy came beside her and stopped at the glass so abruptly that she knew before she looked where the notice would lead.
WAR HAS BEEN DECLARED BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT brITAIN.
Below it, in French:
LA GUERRE A éTé DéCLARéE ENTRE LES éTATS-UNIS ET LA GRANDE-brETAGNE.
There it was, in black ink and fixed type, with nothing to soften it. Elizabeth read it once and then again, as if the second reading might alter the meaning. It did not. War. Not rumour. Not a packet half believed in a tavern. A settled thing.
Darcy had gone very still. Not in the theatrical manner of a man struck dumb, but in the way of one who has taken the whole measure of a room and found one object within it suddenly dangerous.
His hand closed once on the edge of the paper frame.
Elizabeth saw the movement and, because she had begun to learn him in such fragments, understood that this was the instant in which New Orleans had ceased to be a city and become a place in which his name might be used against him.
The porter said, "You are English."
"Yes," said Darcy.
The man nodded, as though that answered every useful question. "Then you had best know it plainly. They have been talking."
"Who?" asked Thomas.
"The men at the Custom House. The fellows who keep the paper moving. The ones who like to know what arrives by river and what leaves by it." He tipped his chin toward Darcy. "They have your name."
Elizabeth turned. "How do you know that?"
"Because names travel faster than men in this city," he said. "And because there was a clerk at the quay yesterday asking after an English gentleman with a wounded shoulder, a guide from the interior, and papers from the King's service."
Darcy's gaze remained on the notice. "The King's service," he repeated softly.
It was not a question. The words had the plain chill of recognition.
The porter shrugged. "That is what was said."
So it was not the city in general that had become dangerous.
It was he. No wall had sprung up. No alarm had been cried through the streets.
New Orleans had continued its trade, its repairs, its gossip, its bargaining.
Somewhere among all that ordinary motion, a report had moved through a clerk's hand and settled on Darcy's person like a mark.
"Who told them?" asked Elizabeth.
"Who tells most things?" said the porter. "A man with information, a man with a grievance, a man paid to remember. Take your choice."
Darcy looked at her then. "We should go in."
"You mean the house?" she said.
"I mean the house, and then the office, if they send for me."
"Do you think they will?"
"Yes."
There was no flourish in the answer. No self-importance. Only the settled knowledge of a man who has lived too long with papers in his pocket and other men's governments in his route.
Mr. Bennet, who had been standing a little apart and reading over the heads of the crowd, came up now with a dry expression that might have been amusement if the circumstances had allowed it.
"So," he said, "the newspapers have reached the matter before the magistrates have had breakfast."
Elizabeth said, "Papa."
"What? It is the first service the press has rendered in some days. One should acknowledge it."
Darcy folded the notice with care and handed it to Elizabeth. "Keep that."
She took it, though she did not know why he wished it so. The paper felt too light for what it meant.
"You knew nothing of this?" she asked.
"No."
"Not even a suspicion?"
"I knew the date. I did not know the hour at which America would choose to tell itself."
That, at least, was honest. It was also enough to chill her more than she cared to admit.
If the declaration had been made while they were still in the wilderness, then every mile of their return had been taken in ignorance.
Every decision, every crossing, every hour in which they had discussed the future over campfire and mud had been lived inside a country that had already become a hostile one.
The porter moved off. The crowd thinned and closed again.
Men resumed reading. A woman laughed once, sharply, at something in the French column and then stopped when her companion did not join her.
The city had absorbed the news the way it absorbed all things that arrived in print, with argument, contradiction, and appetite.
They had taken perhaps ten steps toward the house when a clerk in a dark coat approached from the direction of the quay.
He was not a military man. He had the neat, pale look of someone employed in a place where ink mattered more than muscle.
Two constables followed him at a distance, not close enough to make a show, but not so far that he could be mistaken for a pedestrian.
He removed his hat.
"Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy?" he asked.
Darcy stopped. "Yes."
"I am from the Custom House. We have been advised of your return."
Thomas looked at the man. "Advised by whom?"
"By a number of persons," said the clerk. "By Mr. Miller's memorandum. By the port office. By the descriptions that arrived with the morning papers. There is no need to trouble ourselves with the order of all that."
That was worse than a direct explanation. It meant the matter had moved through several hands and settled into certainty.
The clerk continued. "You are requested to attend at the office at once."
Darcy's voice remained even. "Requested."
"Yes, sir."
"You mean detained."